Leading Culture Change: What Every CEO Needs To Know is a practical guide for top leaders who are faced with the challenge of shaping their culture to create long term, sustainable value. Culture is changeable—but only with CEO sponsorship and a methodical, best practices approach.

Author Christopher S. Dawson draws on 25 years of experience as an organizational consultant in a variety of industries to delineate five critical success factors, without which culture change is unlikely to occur. He offers practical tools and approaches to facilitate culture change, in addition to an overall framework that acts as a yardstick for seasoned and new top leaders. The book provides a "red-yellow-green" level of urgency tool for determining the degree of organizational effort required to address the gap between strategy and culture; a roadmap for culture change; and more.

After describing how to effect change, the text describes frequent scenarios, providing guidelines, an in-depth case example, and lessons for top leaders. Finally, the book outlines four essential leadership competencies—dual-horizon vision; self-awareness; team leadership; and source of inspiration—based on the requirements for leaders of any transformation.

This book is an ideal guide for today and tomorrow's top leaders—as well as a valuable supplement to management consultants' and human resource executives' professional training.

About the author

Christopher S. Dawson is President of Dawson Consulting Group, based in Silicon Valley, California. The firm focuses on building organizational capabilities in three overlapping practice areas: Strategy, Culture, and Leadership. For further information about Dr. Dawson or his firm, please visit www.DawsonConsult.com.

"Chris Dawson has shared his 25 years of practical wisdom and experience about leading culture change in this outstanding book. Having worked with him for most of those years, I have seen Chris' finely honed judgment and methods at work. It is exciting to see his ideas come to life in this book. I can strongly recommend both Chris and this practical guide to the seasoned CEO and the new manager faced with changing culture."

—David Carey, CEO and President, Outrigger Enterprises

"Leading Culture Change: What Every CEO Needs to Know provides concrete, practical guidance to ensure that your organization can move quickly through the process of assessing the status quo; crafting culture objectives that will yield maximum value because they are specifically tailored to your industry, your competitive environment, and your company's development stage; and generating an implementation road map that will yield a vibrant, dynamic, and self-sustaining culture. This book is a must read for both the experienced CEO, desiring a completive edge to improve business performance, and the newly minted CEO or Division Head, hungry to transform his or her organization into a market leader in the global economy."

—M.A. Taylor, President & CEO, AURORA UV Inc.

"Organizational culture is complex and often difficult to sort out. However, Chris Dawson offers a set of valuable frameworks that allows the practitioner to make sense of thorny issues, along with providing a comprehensive approach to managing change."

—Mark Mallinger, Associate Dean and Professor of Applied Behavorial Science, Graziadio School of Business, Pepperdine University

"A practical and timely guide for the new or seasoned CEO on how to use culture as a lever to effect positive change and create value in an organization."